I've a blog hosted with DynDNS from my home, so my presence on the web is via a static host name, not a dynamic IP address assigned by my ISP. Dandy. Let's say it's "http://beaver1.homeserver.org/blog/"

I bought a domain name from FastHosts where they can redirect to a given URL such as the above. So say the domain I bought was "theblog.org". This is fine, but when you enter the site, the internal links are the DynDNS address.

The URL bar is fine if you go to "http://theblog.org", but all the "internal" post links point to "http://beaver1.homeserver.org/blog/p?=4432" or whatever the post is. I know there are two settings in Wordpress, the site address URL and the Wordpress address URL. Changing one or the other to "http://theblog.org" doesn't seem to work.

Could I use Apache's rewrite engine to change "http://beaver1.homeserver.org/blog/p?=3343" to "http://theblog.org/p?=3343" for example or what? Any help appreciated. How do the pros do it?

I'm really not sure if this is a Wordpress thing or something else. If something else, could I use the rewrite engine to fix it?

acid_kewpie

10-19-2011 02:10 PM

you can't (well... shouldn't) try to change the html code being returned by wordpress. sounds like a nice idea, but it always goes bad in the end.

when you say this other domain redirects, what do you mean? what actual operation happens? and http redirect, or this actually a purely dns based solution and no such operation occurs.

For wordpress you'd basically just want to change the blog address to the "nice" domain name, possible leaving the site url as the real address if you wish (that address is used for css, images, admin etc... not the actual posts.)

arashi256

10-20-2011 04:18 AM

The FastHosts forwards the request from "http://theblog.org" to "http://beaver1.homeserver.org/blog/" but the fowarding is set to "Masked", so only the "http://theblog.org" URL appears in the browser address bar. The other types of redirection where HTTP 301 or 302, which didn't seem right.

What I want is instead of "http://theblog.org" appearing in the address bar, no matter which page you're on (because of the mask) and the *internal* Wordpress site links looking like: -

"http://theblog.org/?p=3343", both internally on Wordpress links and in my address bar. If I set the Wordpress site address URL to "http://theblog.org", it breaks a lot of the theme's CSS stylesheets and I cannot get to wp-admin any more.

ok so this forwarding is just a crappy iframe? if you view the source of that page, you just see an iframe pointing to the real address? sounds like that's what it is, and that sucks.

surely all you actually want is, assuming that there's no even better way here, to just set the "nice" name to be a DNS CNAME to the dynamic host name. That should sort out everything just fine, if you can do it. depends on what this service you've purchased really provides though.

arashi256

10-20-2011 04:53 AM

I can get to the CNAME records for my hosting, but the "points to" entry can only contain an IP address, not "http://beaver1.homeserver.org". I assume none of this would be a problem if I had a static IP address rather than a DynDNS hostname that is updated with my ISP-assigned dynamic IP address.

The CNAME entry has [textbox].theblog.org with the ".theblog.org" being something you cannot change.

TenTenths

10-21-2011 02:34 AM

Buy a $4 a month hosting account and host your blog "outside", or use your new domain name with DynDNS and point it to your home machine as well. Just because it's registered with FastHosts doesn't mean you have to use them for your DNS providers.